Category: insurance

Stress and scenario testing are important risk assessment tools. They also provide useful ways to prepare in advance for adverse scenarios so that management doesn’t have to create everything from first principles when something similar occurs.

But trying to imagine scenarios, particularly very severe scenarios, isn’t straightforward. We don’t have many examples of very extreme events.

Some insurers will dream up scenarios from scratch. It’s also common to refer to prior events and run the current business through those dark days. The Global Financial Crisis is a favourite – how would our business manage under credit spread spikes, drying up of liquidity, equity fall markets, higher lapses, lower sales, higher retrenchment claims, higher individual and corporate defaults, switches of funds out of equities, early withdrawals and surrenders and increased call centre volumes?

Some markets have banned sale of insurance alongside lending

Another way to deal with the problem of competition in credit life is to simply not permit the sale of insurance at the same time as the loan. This means that more providers will have an opportunity to make the sale since the lender doesn’t have the ability to slip the product in alongside the loan.

Some problems:

Overall this will increase acquisition costs as it is extremely cost efficient to distribute along with the loan granting process.

The lender is still in the best position to follow up with an outbound sales lead in the days or weeks after the loan has been granted (unless they are prohibited from selling at all, which is another option that can be considered)

Lenders may not be prepared to lend without the protection of credit life in place

The reality remains that for some lenders, for some loans and for some credit life policies, the product acts as a source of revenue rather than a risk mitigant. Without that extra revenue, the loan might not be viable due to risks and expenses of collecting the installments.

The question as to whether the benefit payable under a credit life policy can or should include arrears payments.

The purpose of a credit life policy is to protect the policyholder, the lender, and the policyholder’s estate (not necessarily in that order) against death, disability or retrenchment. This is only effectively achieved if the entire amount owing under the credit agreement is paid off by the policy.

So as a starting point, it would make sense for arrears to be included. All the stakeholders in the arrangement want this.

In this post I want to discuss substitute policies again, talk about cover for self-employed persons and definitions of waiting periods.

What is a substitute policy

Substitute policies are one of the few drivers of real potential competition and therefore competitive markets for credit life in South Africa. That’s probably not the definition you were expecting but nevertheless it is true.

With some exceptions, credit life is not sold in a competitive or symmetrical environment and customers have little or no bargaining power.

A substitute policy is a policy from another insurer (not connected to the lender) that covers the same or similar benefits and legally must be accepted as a substitute for the cover required by the lender under the terms of the loan.

Historically, the rate of substitute policies was tiny. Often less than 1%. Lenders and their associated insurers weren’t exactly incentivised to make it an easy process. For smaller loans and therefore smaller policies, the incremental acquisition costs can be prohibitive.

Substitute policies are gaining momentum

I am aware of several players specifically targeting existing credit life customers and aiming to switch these customers to their own products.

This has been enabled through:

standardising of credit life policies

bulking of many different small credit life policies into a larger one that is more cost effective to acquire and administer

technology (digital / online especially but also call centres) that can moderate costs

the growing awareness of how profitable these policies often are for a standalone insurer, even at the various caps imposed.

Lenders may need to supplement revenue on high risk customers because interest rate caps apply, but the stand alone insurer is focussed on a reasonable underwriting result, not the level necessary to offset costs elsewhere.

What counts as a substitute policy / minimum prescribed benefits

A substitute policy simply needs to cover the minimum benefits from section 3 of the credit life regulations. This covers death, permanent disability, temporary disability and unemployment or loss of income.

Credit Life regulations have been live for long enough now that insurers are starting to feel the impact and the shake-up of amongst industry players is starting to emerge.

There have been plenty of debate around the regulations, in part because of the dramatic financial and operational impact they will have, and partly because of how imperfectly worded they are and the scope for interpretation.

I’ll be posting about this more in the coming days.

Basing the premium on initial or outstanding balance

First, a real anomaly is the ability for insurers to charge the capped premium rate either on initial loan balance or on the declining outstanding balance.